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We must bring money back down to earth.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earthaphilosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.The months and years ahead will surely see a flood of books proposing micro- and macro-economic fixes to the financial crises of the day. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different visionaa meta-economic vision, looking above the top tine and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy.The soil of the economy? Bringing money back down to earth?This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path, and to begin to walk down it, is the mission of Slow Money.This mission emerges from decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur by Woody Tasch, whose explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century.These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money investigates an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations.Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local?Could a million American families get their food from CSAs?What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?Such questionsaat the heart of Slow Moneyaare the first step on our path to a new economy and a new culture. Inquiries into Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built aroundanot extraction and consumption butapreservation and restoration.Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.

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Woody Tasch is Chairman and President of Slow Money, a 501 c 3 formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and to promote new principles of fiduciary responsibility to support sustainable agriculture and the emergence of a restorative economy. For ten years, through 2008, Tasch was Chairman of Investors' Circle, a network of angel investors, family offices, and social purpose funds and foundations that has invested $133 million in 200 early stage sustainability-promoting ventures and venture funds, since 1992. During much of the 1990s, Woody was Treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, where, as part of an innovative mission-related venture capital investing program, a substantial investment was made in Stonyfield Farm, now the worlds largest maker of organic yogurt. Woody has worked as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, board member and consultant with such organizations as Prince Ventures (a healthcare venture fund), Healthdata International, CERES (the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies), National Mentor, Greenway, the Nantucket Education Trust, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) and The Farmers Diner. Woody's involvement in food dates back to 1979, when he developed a case study program at The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (home of Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat and the "green revolution"); he co-authored Food Production and Public Policy in Developing Countries (Praeger Special Studies). He has been founding Chairman of several NGOs: the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance (supporting over 100 small-scale venture funds that target economically disadvantaged regions), Sustainable Nantucket (environmentally responsible growth management on Nantucket Island) and the Nantucket Education Trust (affordable housing for teachers). Articles, interviews or profiles have appeared in Ode, Hemisphere, Green Money Journal, Amherst Alumni Magazine, Resurgence, Andover Review, Utne Reader, More Than Money, Il Sole-24 Ore (Italian financial press), Steering Business Towards Sustainability (United Nations University Press), WBUR and Conscious Talk Radio. He is a frequent speaker at various socially responsible business and sustainable agriculture venues, including Social Venture Network, SRI in the Rockies and Terra Madre. He is the author of the recently published Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Woody graduated Magna Cum Laude from Amherst College in 1973. "